There's no "I" in team... but what about "we"?

There's something about unity that makes it so hard to grab a hold of. Sometime's we trick ourselves into thinking it just comes naturally to those that are serving God in some sort of ministry. We like to view it as a free gift that God just gives away, or at worst like a starbucks gift card we buy last minute for someone we forgot to get a gift for. No time or effort necessary.

We can treat team building and even our core relationships like this sometimes. That the pieces will just fall into place and those that we have the strongest connection with will just come our way and fall into our laps.That kind of unity will probably not last and at best is most likely very superficial.

It's very easy as a leader in ministry to gather people around us that agree with everything we have to say. Anyone who doesn't agree with us right away is automatically 'unteachable' or too difficult to work with. We treat the word disagreement as a threat to momentum and even at times as an attack on us personally. Therefore the core group of people we end up gathering around us in this scenario, unfortunately, has very little diversity and will seriously lack creativity. As our team grows and people begin to be attracted to the life that is being manifested in our ministry, we can look around and do a spot check of the unity within our ministry at any given time and genuinely feel that it is strong.

The reality in that scenario is that the unity we think we have, is really no unity at all. All we've achieved is a carbon copy of ourselves and a small dose of what God actually desires to do through our lives.

We need people around us that bring the most out of us. People who challenge us and ask a lot of questions. People who are good at things we're not good at but don't make us feel silly for not being as good as they are at those things.

These people don't always just appear out of thin air. These kind of people are a bit harder to come by. They're the ones that might not vote the same way you do, or listen to the same bands that you do, or dress the same way you do. They are the kind of people who at first may drive you absolutely crazy. They are the ones who may take a lot more effort to establish that trust and cohesion we desperately crave to have in our teams as leaders and the people we want to have in our lives period.

Jesus modeled this really well didn't he?

He gathered those who were brown nosers and just wanted to impress him and those who we're struggling to probably get out of bed in the morning. He seemed to want to gather a team of people around him that would need to value each other in their differences, people that didn't see eye to eye on everything. The one thing he did require of all of the 12 is that they did agree on one thing... that they follow him at all costs. He knew that they wouldn’t always agree. He also knew that if they agreed on the one thing that mattered most, there would be nothing that they couldn't achieve.

A rainbow is beautiful not because each color is brilliant on it’s own, but because they shine together in harmony. Let us strive for unity in diversity. It is not natural and it is not cheap, which is a good thing because neither is the Kingdom of God.